Brian Van Lau

Brian Van Lau was born in 1996 in Honolulu, Hawaii. His work primarily deals with romanticism and the ability to affect memory through visual text. He focuses on topics of family, isolation, and of constructed idealism in both. His main interest in photography is in its ability to serve as both evidence of reality and the simultaneous perversion of it. He is self-taught, basing much of his work in suburbia within the valley of Issaquah, Washington, where he currently works.

We Shared the Same Color that Evening

I’ve clung to a certain idealist outlook on my life for a while. As I’ve gotten older, the veneer of my family’s past began to crumble, revealing the fragility of it all. It’s as though my ideas of childhood – how everyone seemed to be, how everything was supposed to work – were built upon ideas set for me, from the security of our home to the longevity of our relationships. In the time since my teenage years these fragmentations have become more apparent, and crystalized in the complacency of our attitudes towards it.

A memory forged in time,
perpetually perverted and unresolved,
the colors of the evening sun stain everything,
and the images recorded are only a fragment of the truth,
isolated and romanticized,
yet echoed and solved in another.

And this mirrors my feelings towards my family, both biological and found: the solutions for one relationship being found in another, completely alienated and disavowed from the other, a potential catharsis of some sort just out of reach. Perhaps what I fear more now is this isolation, knowing a resolve can take place, but never does.